iPhone 3 - Beginning of the End

[snousle]

I had really admired the iPhone for its simple design, snappy performance, and resistance to feature creep. With version 3.0 of the software, this promising start seems to have gone off the rails.

The omission of cut and paste was among the most courageous decisions I'd seen in any software system, and as I had predicted, this new "feature" is intrusive and a general pain in the ass. All my reflexes have become wrong - any lingering finger brings up an unwanted selection box. The size of the screen makes it very hard to adjust the selection box with accuracy anyway. And the pop-up menus are always appearing when I don't want them. Verdict: Still better off without it.

The phone now has a habit of freezing at arbitrary moments. It NEVER did this before, and now it does it all the time. FAIL.

Sorry, Apple. You started out on the right foot. But this is a step backwards. The beginning of the end. And the performance problems seem very obviously a move to drive customers to newer, faster, more profitable hardware. All you have done is ensure that my next phone will be something else.

Is it too late to downgrade?

Comments

[danthered.livejournal.com]

Well of course you can't downgrade. If you really wanted to use the previous software, Apple would let you. They don't let you, ergo you don't really want to. This infuriating, patronising smarm hasn't always pervaded Apple's offerings, but it has for quite a long time. And I say that as a 25-year user of Apple computers almost exclusively.

[jpeace.livejournal.com]

As the resident iphone fanboy, I can chime in.

Yes you can downgrade (http://www.felixbruns.de/iPod/firmware/) to an earlier firmware with a somewhat reasonable amount of work (http://www.iphoneheat.com/2009/04/how-to-downgrade-iphone-os-30-to-221-step-by-step-guide/).

I'll agree that cut and paste feels like a rough retrofit at times and forces a more hands-off operation of the web. And shake-to-undo is the stupidest idea in forever. But this is all part of a grand acceleration in mobile computer development, and it was due many many years before the iphone ever got here. Five years from now the idea of a phone that doesn't do 3x as much as what iphone #3 does today will seem like a customer-hating market failure. Teething problems are not conspiracies to make you upgrade.

You have a dozen comparable choices in smartphones now. Perhaps a high-end Nokia or one of the new Android phones?

[snousle.livejournal.com]

My next phone won't be happening for a few years. Cell coverage is so bad here I'm considering just using the iphone as a wireless internet device.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

I really can't see how leaving out cut and paste is "courageous" but I'll ask you this - the most important complaint relevant to that lack I've heard is from people who want to use truly secure WiFi passwords that are not practically typeable. How would you solve that problem, without adding cut and paste, or forcing them to degrade their WiFi security and have to re-password everything else they have that has a way to accept a complex password?

[snousle.livejournal.com]

It is courageous because so many people whine about "features" that they think are important whether they use them or not and whether they improve the actual user experience or not. This is a pervasive irrationality in software design that results in systems that try to do everything but do nothing well. This is a phone, not an office computer, and as such it needs simplicity for common tasks, not complexity for sophisticated things that it's never going to handle very well anyway. So clearly defining the scope and role of a device is to defy the market pressures and consumer neuroses that make products suck. The iPhone was one of the few products that took this path and the omission of cut and paste (which seems obviously a deliberate choice) is the foremost example of that philosophy.

I'm not sure wifi passwords are a particularly important case, the phone remembers them so you only ever have to type them once. How does cut and paste help the situation? Someone has to type it somewhere in order to be copied to the clipboard in the first place.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure wifi passwords are a particularly important case, the phone remembers them so you only ever have to type them once. How does cut and paste help the situation? Someone has to type it somewhere in order to be copied to the clipboard in the first place.

Once, yes, unless for some reason you have to wipe your phone and start over. Of course, that's once for each WiFi site you want to connect to. If one moves around a lot - that could get tedious.

And as for typing, I have never, EVER typed my WiFi password, it's always been done by cut and paste. I obtained it from GRC.com's password generator and have simply cut and pasted it when necessary ever since. Consider that the one that came up when I went to verify the URL is zjN+vZEk),Mi(A\e9B`hMCxD]eV!J;J~OZJ]x{%lbTz#CWMegTunk)0fQ55'ZC[ and you might begin to understand why people who use highly entropic passwords don't want to have to type them!

Now then - there are ways around this for this specific instance, such as copying a file to the phone that contains nothing but the password and having the WiFi configuration tool able to pull the password out of that. But that's not available, to my knowledge. The problem was ignored, and for security conscious geeks this WAS a serious problem even if you don't perceive it as one for yourself.

[wolfstoy.livejournal.com]

I've had no such problems, though I just have an iPod. The fact that I have the ability to open a page in a new window now makes this device much more usable for me.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's one thing that is very nice!